This is a repository copy of Haunting Evidence: Quoting the Prisoner in 19th Century Old Bailey Trial Discourse. The Defences of Cooper (1842) and McNaughten (1843). White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/90464/ Version: Published Version Book Section: Johnson, AJ orcid.org/0000-0002-8757-8053 (2015) Haunting Evidence: Quoting the Prisoner in 19th Century Old Bailey Trial Discourse. The Defences of Cooper (1842) and McNaughten (1843). In: Arendholz, J, Bublitz, W and Kirner-Ludwig, M, (eds.) The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then. Topics in English Linguistics, 89 . De Gruyter Mouton , pp. 369-400. ISBN 978-3-11-043175-9 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110427561-017 (c) 2015. Walter de Gruyter GmbH. This is a copy of the chapter, 'Johnson, AJ (2015) Haunting Evidence: Quoting the Prisoner in 19th Century Old Bailey Trial Discourse. The Defences of Cooper (1842) and McNaughten (1843)', published by De Gruyter Mouton in 'Arendholz, J, Bublitz, W and Kirner-Ludwig, M, (eds.) The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then. Topics in English Linguistics, 89.' Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Reuse Unless indicated otherwise, fulltext items are protected by copyright with all rights reserved. The copyright exception in section 29 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 allows the making of a single copy solely for the purpose of non-commercial research or private study within the limits of fair dealing. The publisher or other rights-holder may allow further reproduction and re-use of this version - refer to the White Rose Research Online record for this item. Where records identify the publisher as the copyright holder, users can verify any specific terms of use on the publisher’s website. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Alison Johnson 15 Haunting Evidence: Quoting the Prisoner in 19th Century Old Bailey Trial Discourse. The Defences of Cooper (1842) and McNaughten (1843) Abstract: This paper focuses on the representation of quoted speech in a corpus of Old Bailey trials from Victorian London, with detailed examination of two of them: Cooper (1842) and McNaughten (1843). These trials involve an insanity defence. As the trials were recorded by hand, they entail scribal choices about whether to record and how to represent quotation, making choices about direct and indirect quotation pragmatically interesting, since the illocutionary force of the recorded utterances is selected as important by the scribe. My corpus, the Monomania Corpus, is collected from the larger Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913 [available online: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/], which contains 197,745 criminal trials over more than two centuries. Criminal trial hearings are communicative events which are densely intertextually structured. Prior questioning of witnesses and records of what they say are extensively quoted, requoted, and recontextualized in the course of the trial and quotation is used to demonstrate the defendant’s criminal liability or his incapacity to commit a crim- inal offence. The establishment of a binding legal reality crucially hinges on the differential weights of prosecution and defence evidence, so the selective power of quotation is an important resource for defending the prisoner. In the case of Cooper, the prosecution’s use of direct and indirect quotation is incriminating for the defendant and the witnesses seem well ‘rehearsed’ in supporting the pros- ecution case, whereas the defence picture, drawn out through family members, presents the defendant’s insane utterances from childhood to early manhood, with the miserable, poor, young man being seen as easy prey by a constabulary looking for results. In McNaughten’s case, we see the two institutions of the law and medicine fighting over culpability and insanity, as the defence quotes from medical interviews with the accused. The analysis shows the powerful use of hypothetical quotation and establishes a new category of quotation: metatalk for suppressing quotation. The “haunting evidence” (Eigen 1995: 160) of prisoner testimony is given voice through the powerful alliance of advocate and witness (lay, and medical), as they tell the court, through the prisoner’s words, what he is incapable of putting together himself. The prisoner is prosecuted in his own words. What he says on arrest, in gaol, and before the magistrate, is recorded and replayed to self-incriminate, as he is ventriloquized by the prosecution, and it is Bereitgestellt von | De Gruyter / TCS Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 06.10.17 11:56 370 Alison Johnson therefore a masterful adversarial reversal to defend with the same voice, but from a different perspective. Keywords: quotation, reported speech, insanity, Victorian trial, defence, corpus 1 Introduction At 120 million words the Old Bailey Proceedings 1674–1913 (Hitchcock et al. 2012) (hereafter OBP), containing 197,000 trials, is a seemingly homogenous, large corpus. For forensic discourse analysts, the two and a half centuries of the OBP is too wide a period to examine as a whole, since statutes, trial practice and lawyer and witness involvement in trials change substantially over this time (Hostettler 2009) and, as Hunston (2011) points out, “a corpus, unlike a text, cannot be ana- lysed”. I therefore focus on two complete trials from the Victorian period (1837– 1901), a period which could be described as a crucible of legal change, since the Old Bailey Sessions House sees the growth and rise of three professions within its walls. Police officers from the newly-formed Metropolitan Police force (from 1829), barristers from a “newly emerging advocacy bar whose ambitious efforts to fashion a defense and prosecution ‘case’ would have profound consequences for the tone and texture of witness examination”, and the “first forensic-psychiatric witnesses” (Eigen 1995: 133), though these medics did not call themselves ‘psy- chiatrists’ until the 20th century,¹ form a new cast of participants in the trial court- room. Prior to the Prisoners’ Counsel Act (1836), defendants had not been entitled to a full defence by counsel and defendants largely defended themselves (Cairns 1998; Archer 2013). Outside the courtroom the Industrial Revolution had seen the expansion of “urban areas where poverty and crime were growing” (Hostettler 2009: 167) and “the invisible plague”, an “epidemic of insanity […] haunted the age” (Torrey/Miller 2001: 3). The OBP website’s statistics function shows a sharp rise in non compos mentis (a post-classical Latin legal term, meaning ‘not of sound mind’ or insane) verdicts at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, which continued through- out the 1900s. This is reflected in the broader international picture provided by Torrey/Miller (2001) across England and Wales, Ireland, Canadian and Atlantic Provinces, and the United States, rising from less than 1 to over 3 insane persons per 1,000 in England and Wales between 1807 and 1907. 1 There are no occurrences of psychiatr -ist -y -ic in the OBP and the lemmata psychology -y -ical -ist -ists only exist after 1882. Bereitgestellt von | De Gruyter / TCS Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 06.10.17 11:56 Quoting the prisoner 371 There was a uniquely Victorian word for insanity, viz. monomania (today diag- nosed as “psychosis or paranoid schizophrenia” (Bewley 2008), which, accord- ing to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED Online 2012), spans the period 1815 to 1883. Jean Étienne Esquirol’s treatise on insanity, which introduced the concept of monomania, is described in Taylor/Shuttleworth (1998: 256) as “a ‘disease of the sensibility’, which changes in accordance with the prevailing forms of society”, or as Esquirol (1838/1845) put it “a disease of civilization” where, following the decline of religion, governments, in order to maintain authority over men, have had recourse to a police. Since that period, it is the police that troubles feeble imaginations, and establishments for the insane are peopled with monomaniacs who, fearing this authority, are delirious respecting the influence which it exercises, and by which they think themselves pursued. This mono- maniac, who would formerly have been delirious with respect to magic, sorcery and the infernal regions; is now delirious, thinking himself threatened, pursued, and ready to be incarcerated by agents of the police. (Esquirol [1838, trans Hunt 1845] Taylor/Shuttleworth 1998: 257) The condition and circumstances described by Esquirol of feeble people feeling threatened and pursued fit both of the cases we examine here. The trials occur within twelve months: Cooper (June 1842) and McNaughten (February 1843). In Cooper’s case he is literally pursued by the police, as well as fearing and threat- ening them. When cornered and arrested after a chase, he is recorded as saying “don’t ill-use me” (Testimony of Stephen Turnbull), and McNaughten is quoted as saying he is “pursued” by “Tories” when he is before the Magistrate after his arrest for shooting the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel’s private secretary: The Tories in my native city have driven me to this, and have followed me to France, Scot- land, and other parts; I can get no sleep from the system they pursue towards me; I believe I am driven into a consumption by them; they wish to murder me. (Testimony of Inspector Tierney) This paper investigates the Victorian insanity defence in what I have called the Monomania Corpus, since all trials contain the word. This deliberate bias allows us to examine the role of medical evidence of insanity. The corpus contains 15 trials from 1833 to 1907, almost identically coinciding with Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901), with the final two trials containing references to the disappearance of the diagnosis (“monomania is not much believed in now”, trial of Sando 1898; “the old idea of monomania is not now accepted”, trial of Church 1907).